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Friday, 22 March 2013

NABLOPOMO- Day 22

Talk about an opportunity you let pass you by.

I have let many
opportunities pass me by, sometimes because I thought the risk was unacceptable
and other times out of sheer stupidity. Sometimes when an opportunity presents
itself we do not see it as such, we consider it as being of little or no consequence
until we think back many years later and think what if I had taken that road
instead of the one I took.

Perhaps the one
opportunity I regret the most is not finishing even one semester of college. I
was smart enough and I was doing well in my classes. One day I had to write a
math test. I had a cheat sheet and I was allowed to use the text book so it
should have been a simple thing except that it wasn't.

I sat down at the
testing desk and read the first question but it was like trying to read a foreign
language that I didn't know. I read that question three times and each time I
drew a complete blank, I had no idea even how to start. Instead of just
skipping it and going to the next question, I panicked. I grabbed by books and
papers and headed to the admissions office to tell them I quit.

I did too; I was
out of the college in less than three days and headed home. Why do I consider
this a lost opportunity, well aside from the educational benefits I could have
garnered, I was studying programming. I took a test about twenty years later to
determine rather I would be a good fit for Network Engineering or Programming.
Turns out I would have made one hell of a good programmer had I stuck with it.

And no I didn't
take the training then either, I couldn't afford the tuition, so here I am
someone who could have been out there helping develop things like Windows,
could have been on the leading edge of the C/C++ language and instead I am a
broken down middle aged woman who writes about what she could have been.